Site Mobile Navigation

The Land of the Video Geek

AT first glance, the sprawling COEX mall here seems like any other urban shopping destination. On a late-summer Thursday, there were the bustling stores and lively restaurants, couples on dates and colleagues mingling after work.

But then there were the screams.

Frantic, piercing, the shrieks echoed down the corridors from one corner of the vast underground complex. There hundreds of young people, mostly women and girls, waved signs and sang slogans as they swirled in the glare of klieg lights. It was the kind of fan frenzy that anywhere else would be reserved for rockers or movie legends.

Or sports stars. In fact the objects of the throng’s adoration were a dozen of the nation’s most famous athletes, South Korea’s Derek Jeters and Peyton Mannings. But their sport is something almost unimaginable in the United States. These were professional video gamers, idolized for their mastery of the science-fiction strategy game StarCraft.

With a panel of commentators at their side, protected from the throbbing crowd by a glass wall, players like Lim Yo-Hwan, Lee Yoon Yeol and Suh Ji Hoon lounged in logo-spangled track suits and oozed the laconic bravado of athletes the world over.

And they were not even competing. They were gathered for the bracket selection for a coming tournament season on MBC Game, one of the country’s two full-time video game television networks. And while audiences watched eagerly at home, fans lucky enough to be there in person waved hand-lettered signs like “Go for it, Kang Min” and “The winner will be Yo-Hwan {oheart}.”

All in all it was a typical night in South Korea, a country of almost 50 million people and home to the world’s most advanced video game culture: Where more than 20,000 public PC gaming rooms, or “bangs,” attract more than a million people a day. Where competitive gaming is one of the top televised sports. Where some parents actually encourage their children to play as a release from unrelenting academic pressure. Where the federal Ministry of Culture and Tourism has established a game development institute, and where not having heard of StarCraft is like not having heard of the Dallas Cowboys. The finals of top StarCraft tournaments are held in stadiums, with tens of thousands of fans in attendance.

Noh Yun Ji, a cheerful 25-year-old student in a denim skirt, had come to the COEX with 10 other members of one of the many Park Yong Wook fan clubs. “I like his style,” she said of Mr. Park, who plays the advanced alien species called Protoss in StarCraft. “I watch basketball sometimes, but StarCraft is more fun. It’s more thrilling, more exciting.”

South Korea’s roughly $5 billion annual game market comes to about $100 per resident, more than three times what Americans spend. As video games become more popular and sophisticated, Korea may provide a glimpse of where the rest of the world’s popular culture is headed.

“Too often I hear people say ‘South Korea’ and ‘emerging market’ in the same sentence,” said Rich Wickham, the global head of Microsoft’s Windows games business. “When it comes to gaming, Korea is the developed market, and it’s the rest of the world that’s playing catch-up. When you look at gaming around the world, Korea is the leader in many ways. It just occupies a different place in the culture there than anywhere else.”

JUST after 1 one Friday night, Nam Hwa-Jung, 22, and Kim Myung-Ki, 25, were on a date in Seoul’s hip Sinchon neighborhood. At a fourth-floor gaming room above a bar and beneath a restaurant specializing in beef, the couple sat side by side on a love seat by the soda machines, each tapping away at a personal computer. Ms. Nam was trying to master the rhythm of a dance game called Audition, while Mr. Kim was locked in a fierce battle in StarCraft.

“Of course we come to PC bangs, like everyone else,” Mr. Kim said, barely looking up. “Here we can play together and with friends. Why would I want to play alone at home?”

A few yards away, amid a faint haze of cigarette smoke, five buddies raced in a driving game called Kart Rider while two young men nearby killed winged demons in the fantasy game Lineage. Another couple lounged in a love seat across the room, the young man playing World of Warcraft while his date tried her skills at online basketball.

Ms. Nam glanced up from her screen. “In Korea, going and playing games at the PC bang together is like going to a bar or going to the movies,” she said.

South Korea is one of the most wired societies in the world. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Korea had 25.4 broadband subscriptions per 100 residents at the end of last year. Only Iceland, with 26.7, ranked higher; the United States had only 16.8.

Yet despite the near-ubiquity of broadband at home, Koreans still flock to PC bangs to get their game on. There is a saying in Seoul that most Koreans would rather skip a meal than eat by themselves. When it comes to games it seems that many Koreans would rather put down the mouse and keyboard than play alone.

Woo Jong-Sik is president of the Korea Game Development and Promotion Institute. Speaking in his office far above Seoul, in the towering Technomart office and shopping complex, he explained the phenomenon simply: “For us, playing with and against other people is much more interesting than just playing alone against a computer.”

It started out that way in the United States too. But as game arcades with their big, clunky machines started disappearing in the 1980’s, gamers retreated from the public arena and into their homes and offices. In the West gaming is now often considered antisocial.

There are certainly concerns about gaming in South Korea. The government runs small treatment programs for gaming addicts, and there are reports every few years of young men keeling over and dying after playing for days on end. But on the whole, gaming is regarded as good, clean fun.

In Seoul’s dense Shinlim district, Huh Hyeong Chan, a 42-year-old math tutor, seemed to be the respected senior citizen at the Intercool PC bang, which covers two floors, smoking and nonsmoking.

“Among people in their 20’s and 30’s I think there is no one who hasn’t been to a PC bang because it’s become a main trend in our society,” he said from his prime seat at the head of a row of computers. “Most people think it’s good for your mental health and it’s a good way to get rid of stress. If you exercise your brain and your mind in addition to your body, that’s healthy.”

Photo

Credit
Asaf Hanuks

And cheap. At most PC bangs an ergonomic chair, powerful computer and fast Internet link cost no more than $1.50 an hour.

Lee Chung Gi, owner of the Intercool bang, said: “It’s impossible for students in any country to study all the time, so they are looking for interesting things to do together. In America they have lots of fields and grass and outdoor space. They have lots of room to play soccer and baseball and other sports. We don’t have that here. Here, there are very few places for young people to go and very little for them to do, so they found PC games, and it’s their way to spend time together and relax.”

TOP pro gamers in South Korea don’t get much chance to relax. Just ask Lim Yo-Hwan. Mr. Lim, 27, is the nation’s most famous gamer, which makes him one of the nation’s most famous people.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

“Normally our wake-up hours are 10 a.m., but these days we can sleep in until around 11:30 or noon,” he said at the SK Telecom StarCraft team’s well-guarded training house in Seoul. “After we wake up we have our breakfast, and then we play matches from 1 p.m. until 5. At 5 p.m. we have our lunch, and then at 5:30 for an hour and a half I go to my gym, where I work out. Then I come home and play until 1 a.m. After 1 I can play more matches or I can go to sleep if I want.”

He smiled. “But not many players sleep at 1.”

Mr. Lim sat in what might be called the players’ lounge: a spacious parlor of plush couches and flat-screen televisions. In an adjoining apartment, the focus was on work. More than a half-dozen other members of the team sat at rows of PC’s demolishing one another at StarCraft, made by Blizzard Entertainment of Irvine, Calif. Outside, guards for the apartment complex kept an eye out for overzealous fans.

“Without covering myself up in disguise it’s really difficult to go out in public,” Mr. Lim said. “Because of the Internet penetration and with so many cameras around, I don’t have privacy in my personal life. Anything I do will be on camera and will be spread throughout the Internet, and anything I say will be exaggerated and posted on many sites.”

“It’s hard because I can’t maintain my relationships with friends,” he added. “In terms of dating, the relationships just don’t work out. So personally there are losses, but I don’t regret it because it was my choice to become a pro gamer.”

Hoon Ju, 33, the team’s coach and a former graduate student in sports psychology, added: “Actually when he goes out we know exactly where he is at all times. That’s because the fans are constantly taking pictures with their cellphones and posting them to the Internet in real time.”

Mr. Woo of the federal game institute estimated that 10 million South Koreans regularly follow eSports, as they are known here, and said that some fan clubs of top gamers have 700,000 members or more. “These fan clubs are actually bigger in size than the fan clubs of actors and singers in Korea,” he said. “The total number of people who go spectate pro basketball, baseball and soccer put together is the same as the number of people who go watch pro game leagues.”

The celebrity of South Korea’s top gamers is carefully managed by game-TV pioneers like Hyong Jun Hwang, general manager of Ongamenet, one of the country’s full-time game networks. “We realized that one of the things that keeps people coming back to television are the characters, the recurring personalities that the viewer gets to know and identify with, or maybe they begin to dislike,” he said. “In other words, television needs stars. So we set out to make the top players into stars, promoting them and so on. And we also do a lot of education with the players, explaining that they have to try to look good, that they have to be ready for interviews.”

For his part Mr. Lim cultivates a relatively low-key image. He knows that at 27 he is nearing the end of his window as an elite player. There are 11 pro teams in the country, he said, and they are full of young guns looking to take him down. But he said experience could make up for a few milliseconds of lost reflexes.

“The faster you think, the faster you can move,” he said. “And the faster you move, the more time you have to think. It does matter in that your finger movements can slow down as you age. But that’s why I try harder and I work on the flexibility of my fingers more than other players.”

Despite the stardom of pro gamers, in most Korean families it’s all about school. That is a big reason the game market in South Korea is dominated by personal computers rather than by game consoles like Sony’s PlayStation and Microsoft’s Xbox that are so popular in the United States and Europe. (The deep historical animosity Koreans feel toward Japan, home of Sony and Nintendo, is another reason.)

“In Korea it’s all study, study, study, learn, learn, learn,” said Park Youngmok, Blizzard’s Korean communications director. “That’s the whole culture here. And so you can’t go buy a game console because all it is is an expensive toy; all it does is play games. But a PC is seen here as a dream machine, a learning machine. You can use it to study, do research. And if someone in the household ends up playing games on it” — he paused, shrugged and grinned — “that’s life.”

Cho Nam Hyun, a high school senior in a middle-class suburb south of Seoul, knows all about it. During his summer “vacation” he was in school from 8 a.m. until 8 p.m. (During the school year he doesn’t finish classes until 10 p.m.) On his desk in his family’s impeccable apartment sits a flip chart showing the number of days until his all-important university entrance exams.

But no matter how hard he studies, Mr. Cho tries to get in just a little gaming, and with his parents’ encouragement. “They are at school all the time, and then they have additional study classes,” said his mother, Kim Eun Kyung, “so games are the best way to get rid of their stress.”

His father, Cho Duck Koo, a photographer, added: “Certainly the games can be a distraction, and now that he is studying for the university exam he plays much less, but in general gaming helps the children with strategic thinking and to learn to multitask. We’ve told him if he goes to university we will get him the best PC possible.”

IT’S all part of a dynamic that has taken technologies first developed in the West — personal computers, the Internet, online games like StarCraft — and melded them into a culture as different from the United States as Korean pajeon are from American pancakes.

Sitting outside another packed soundstage at another cavernous mall, where around 1,000 eSports fans were screaming for their favorite StarCraft players over the Quiet Riot hard-rock anthem “Cum On Feel the Noize,” a pinstriped banker illustrated how South Korea has become the paragon of gaming culture.

“We’re not just the sponsors of this league,” Kim Byung Kyu, a senior manager at Shinhan Bank, one of the country’s largest, said proudly. “We’re the hosts of this league. So we have a bank account called Star League Mania, and you can get V.I.P. seating at the league finals if you’ve opened an account.”

“When I’m in the U.S., I don’t see games in public,” he added. “The U.S. doesn’t have PC bangs. They don’t have game television channels. What you see here with hundreds of people cheering is just a small part of what is going on with games in Korea. At this very moment hundreds of thousands of people are playing games at PC bangs. It’s become a mainstream, public part of our culture, and I don’t see that yet in the U.S. In this regard, perhaps the United States will follow and Korea will be the model.”